The holiday has ended. Wow. How abrupt it is that just a few days ago I still felt like I had all the time in the world to travel and putter about and do all the mindless things and all of a sudden, I am thrown into this situation where my time is no longer mine and there are lessons to go for and books to read, and that the state of affairs is going continue into working life three years later.

Things took a deeper sense of surreality when two days ago, I attended my first lecture in close to three years and everything just came back - the distant yet familiar scribbling of notes, highlighting of keywords, getting irritated by the guy diagonally across who can't stop shaking his legs, complaining to the friend on the left about how the lecturer is not making sense, the mad dash to the canteen to grab some food during the 5-minute break and barely making it back on time and other things I last did in one of Hwa Chong's lecture halls. Nothing has really changed, except that the audience is no longer a uniform shade of brown and even the hair comes in an interesting array of colours. A JC classmate has now green hair! And speaking of fashion, it seems there are as many Crumpler bags around as there are goodies bags at Marina Bay today.

In other aspects of school life, I have been running into so many friends/acquaintances in school it seems almost as if my entire social circle now exists in NTU. Many of them are of the hi-bye variety so when I meet them I have to pull off that surprised look and "woah so you are in NTU too!" in the least perfunctory manner. Of course, there are equally many people whom I am really glad to have bumped into so far. Like the slut who always catches me unawares and the 38 who is now blissfully in love. It feels good to be in the same school all over again.

So does being an undergraduate and doing all the intellectual things associated with it. I'm off to the library!